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If the XL Foods tainted meat debacle wasn’t enough, now we have more evidence that casual deregulation comes at a cost to human health.

That evidence is a study just published online in the prestigious Archives of Internal Medicine. It shows that new drugs approved through a special six-month fast-track process by Health Canada are significantly more likely to cause health problems than those subject to a longer and more rigorous regulatory review.

As my colleague Jesse McLean reported in Tuesday’s Star, about 35 per cent of new drugs that have taken advantage of the federal government’s so-called priority review system since 1995 were later either withdrawn from the market as unsafe or slapped with serious health warnings because of dangerous side effects.

For new drugs that went through a standard year-long regulatory review, the comparable risk figure was 20 per cent.

Those extra health risks might be warranted if the fast-tracked drugs were path-breaking life-savers.

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But, as report author Dr. Joel Lexchin told me, almost three quarters of the drugs that were fast-tracked provided “little new therapeutic benefit.”

Rather, most were changes designed to better position the drugs’ manufacturers in the cutthroat world of pharmaceutical marketing.

Lexchin is an emergency-room physician at Toronto General and Toronto Western Hospitals who also teaches at York University and the University of Toronto. His peer-reviewed “research letter” in the Archives of Internal Medicine looks at 434 new drugs approved by Health Canada between 1995 and 2010.

Of those roughly a quarter were fast-tracked, a process that cut the regulatory approval period in half.

What’s this got to do with XL Foods, an Alberta meat packer whose beef products are being recalled as unsafe in Canada, the U.S and Hong Kong? The answer is that both are examples of what happens when governments cut so-called red tape without thinking through the consequences.

In both cases, entire regulatory systems were subtly changed so that government officials would view the industry being regulated, rather than the public, as their primary client.

In health, the former Liberal government of Jean Chrétien shifted the cost of regulation to the drug companies in an effort to cut costs. That did indeed save Ottawa money. But it also gave the pharmaceutical manufacturers more clout in the regulatory process itself.

One of the results was an enhanced priority review system for new drugs.

In meat packing, the same Liberal government transferred health inspection responsibilities to the agricultural department, whose main job is to act as a booster for agribusiness.

Stephen Harper’s Conservative government only accelerated that trend, shifting from government on-site regulation of meat packers to self-regulation with federal oversight.

In this new world, government meat inspectors don’t necessarily go onto the slaughter house floor to view first-hand how animals are carved up. Instead, they analyze trends from data collected by company inspectors.

In the XL case, as the Canadian Food Inspection Agency now admits, this didn’t work. Only after a virulent strain of E. coli was discovered did federal officials undertake a full hands-on inspection of the plant, an inspection that revealed XL hadn’t been following elementary safety and cleanliness rules.

Ironically, all of this comes just as the federal government unveils the first phase of its latest attempt at deregulation, known as the red tape review.

The changes announced last week are relatively minor and affect only tax collection by the Canada Revenue Agency.

Still to come, according to the government, is more “streamlining” by both the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the drug approvals branch of Health Canada.

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